freud: A software suite for high throughput analysis of particle simulation data

The freud Python package is a library for analyzing simulation data. Written with modern simulation and data analysis workflows in mind, freud provides a Python interface to fast, parallelized C++ routines that run efficiently on laptops, workstations, and supercomputing clusters. The package provides the core tools for finding particle neighbors in periodic systems, and offers a uniform API to a wide variety of methods implemented using these tools. As such, freud users can access standard methods such as the radial distribution function as well as newer, more specialized methods such as the potential of mean force and torque and local crystal environment analysis with equal ease. Rather than providing its own trajectory data structure, freud operates either directly on NumPy arrays or on trajectory data structures provided by other Python packages. This design allows freud to transparently interface with many trajectory file formats by leveraging the file parsing abilities of other trajectory management tools. By remaining agnostic to its data source, freud is suitable for analyzing any particle simulation, regardless of the original data representation or simulation method. When used for on-the-fly analysis in conjunction with scriptable simulation software such as HOOMD-blue, freud enables smart simulations that adapt to the current state of the system, allowing users to study phenomena such as nucleation and growth.